A conversation analytic study on critical intercultural awareness in task enhanced virtual exchange

Advances in online communication technologies offer many opportunities for language learning and intercultural exchange.Through these advancements, telecollaboration has been a recent focus in educational settings and itsimplications have come into prominence in language teaching. However, the social actions and cultural practices performed in these settings and opportunities for critical intercultural awareness (CIA) have been investigated only to a limited extent. From this point of view, drawing upon the 10 hours of screen recordings of over a 4-weeks period of video-mediated task-oriented interactions in eleven tasks in a virtual exchange project between two universities from Turkey and Tunisia, this study contributes to the emergence of opportunities for interactants' critical intercultural awareness (CIA) through a telecollaborative exchange project. By applying the principles of Conversation Analysis methodology, this study aims to describe how an assessment sequence is identified and how assessments are constructed sequentially, and how the first assessment makes the second assessment relevant in and through intercultural tasks. The findings present various uses of lexical and grammatical items and positive or negative assessing responses towards cultural behaviors. The result from analyzing the study suggested that proffering assessments is closely embedded within the enhancement of critical intercultural awareness (CIA). As a CA study to explore critical intercultural awareness (CIA), the findings of this study are expected to bring a new perspective to interculturality and highlight significant implications interactional organization of assessments with its contribution to the online language learning and telecollaboration.